Voxatron Alpha

Voxatron is a block-based platform shooter by Lexaloffle Games, where you navigate a small robot around a destructible world made of tiny cubes, with a variety of enemies to kill.  The game is still in alpha, but there are a number of levels included in the game, as well as a level editor and browser so you can check out other people’s creations..

I love the graphics.. the cute little block-enemies, the bright colours, the way everything starts to break up as you shoot it.. I even loved being killed the first time, because of the little cube explosion!

However, I really don’t enjoy the controls.  It’s not the movement.. I spent a great deal of my childhood playing Spectrum games which used cursors or “w”, “s”, “o” and “p” to move, with the spacebar or some other random button for jumping or shooting.  The movement is fine..

What I don’t like about Voxatron is the shooting, because of having to stop running and face the enemy before I can shoot.  I just found this frustrating.. especially when new enemies appeared up-close and I’d have to run away first, to make room to turn and fire.  It’s a shame, but it tipped the balance enough that I found myself not enjoying the game.. and well, I have more than enough games that I would rather play!

If I’m honest, I probably wouldn’t have given the game more than a quick look if it hadn’t been part of the recent Humble Bundle.. I wouldn’t have bought it without playing and loving a demo, certainly.  However, I love the idea of the Humble Bundle.. and I enjoyed the other games in this pack, so I don’t regret the purchase 🙂

The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is an action adventure RPG by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, the developers of Super Meat Boy.  I got this game via the Humble Voxatron Debut..

I was initially repulsed by the graphics for this game.. a crying boy surrounded by mutated tormentors.. and the story isn’t much nicer.  Apparently, it’s based on a Hebrew Bible story in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and he binds him before leaving him on an altar to die..

In the game, Isaac’s mother begins to hear the voice of God.. who initially tells her that Isaac is unclean, causing her to take away his toys and lock him in his room.. but later demands she sacrifice him to prove her devotion!  To escape, Isaac dives into the basement, where he encounters mutated creatures.. lost brothers and sisters..

To fight these monsters, poor Isaac fires his tears at them.. some, like the squishy-headed thing above, don’t fight back.. while others are immediately hostile.

There are a variety of power-ups and items available too, giving stronger ‘arrows’, shielding or bombs.   The loot from one chest included a yellow bomb with a face.. which I just about recognised as trollface.. just as it exploded, taking away a heart 😮

I’ve had a few forays into the game now, and while the dungeons, loot, enemies and bosses are all randomised, so far each basement I’ve seen has had a treasure room, a shop, and a room with a boss..

The first boss I encountered was Monstro.. who slaughtered me when I got a little too close!

Fighting isn’t complex at all.. if anything it feels a bit cheap as you can just kite the enemy around the room while shooting.  Monstro jumps, landing on the place the player had been standing; easy enough to avoid so long as you don’t get yourself trapped in the corner as I did 😉

The second boss I’ve faced was more repulsive still.. Gemini features conjoined twins: the larger one chases Isaac and strangles him if he gets close enough, while the smaller one intermittently vomits a shower of blood at Isaac!

This boss moves quickly, and I was glad of the rocks to hide behind.. though he did catch up with me on this attempt.  When Isaac dies, it’s game over.. there is no save game system.. you just get to see his Last Will. 😉

The music is actually very good too..
It’s not often I really notice the music in games (especially since I spend a lot of my gaming time on Mumble) but it really adds to the feeling of despair and sadness.  Ok.. I’m off to go hug the kitties now!

The Humble Voxatron Debut

I picked up the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle at the end of September, paying a rather small figure for a number of rather cool indie games.

The latest Humble Bundle is now out: the Humble Voxatron Debut!
As usual, it’s “pay what you want”,though if you want more than the headline game you need to beat the average paid to date.. an absolute bargain right now, as it’s still under a fiver 🙂

The headline game is an alpha of Lexaloffle’s Voxatron, a “voxel-based, old-school-gone-new platform shooter”, where you explore a world made of destructible blocks; it also comes with a voxel designer and level mapping tools, and the ability to share them with your friends!  I wonder if this will be as addictive as Minecraft.. one to explore this weekend, I think!

Also included in the Bundle are the creepy-looking dungeon explorer The Binding of Isaac, by the developers of the equally squicky Super Meat Boy, and puzzle-platform Blocks That Matter by Swing Swing Submarine.

Blocks That Matter sees you play a tiny robot called the Tetrobot, drilling blocks and recombining the materials into other blocks.. it sounds intriguing, but having installed it on my PC at work, I was unable to get it running due to some resolution issue.  I’ll be trying this one at home on the Beast instead 🙂

As for The Binding of Isaac.. I saw this advertised on Steam a while ago, and was repelled by the image of a crying boy surrounded by mutants.. however, I’m not going to let that stop me trying the game out.. that would be silly!

SpaceChem

SpaceChem has now been added to the Humble Bundle.. bringing the total to six games, a prototype and a pre-order!  I already picked up the bundle, but like Trauma before it, SpaceChem has also been made available to those who bought the pack 🙂

SpaceChem is a puzzle game by Zachtronics Industries, where the player takes on the role of a Reactor Engineer, converting various elements into useful chemicals, meeting production quotas and fighting monsters..

The first level, “Of Pancakes and Spaceships”, has you build a simple circuit using commands and directional arrows for your waldos to transfer a molecule of oxygen from the input to the output of the reactor.

When your reactor has produced the required number of molecules, you are presented with an overview of your performance compared to others.. and the option to upload your solution as a video on your YouTube account.

I noticed here that I’m also able to compare my results against my friends.. which means I have to do reasonably well for pride’s sake 😉

The commands are very specific, and I think most players would need to pay attention to the tutorial, or end up fumbling around a lot.  Using an output command in an output area  is not enough.. you have to use the right output command in each specific output area..

On my first try with the Crossover task, I hadn’t noticed this, so ended up with unflushed atoms waiting to collide with the next cycle’s atoms!  Once I fixed this problem, I then ran into the fact that the red waldo’s cycle was shorter than the blue, and therefore faster.. I fixed this by adding Sync commands just after the input, to make the waldos run together.

Bonding added more complexity to the controls, with the grab/drop command capable of being set as a sole grab or drop command.  I found it rather satisfying to see my newly created molecule heading for the output 🙂

The next level had me creating Hydrochloric Acid, which I managed first time, without any assistance!  I was still pleased with this even when I got to the performance screen, and saw that one friend managed this using only 14 symbols, while I used 19.. 😮

There must be more tricks to learn then.. but I’m probably not going to learn them tonight, as I have work in the morning 😉

The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle!

The Humble Bundle is a pack of indie games offered at a price set by the individual customer.. literally “pay what you want”.. where the money gets split between the developers, charity and the Humble Bundle site itself.. again as each customer sees fit.

Supporting indies and charity?  I don’t see a downside.. 🙂

This particular offer was headlined by Frozen Synapse, a turn-based strategy game which seems to have rated highly justabout everywhere.  While you could choose to pay just £1 for the game, paying more than the average also nets you some bonus games..

In this case, the bonus pack was the Humble FrozenByte Bundle, including: Trine a puzzle-action game featuring a thief, a wizard and a warrior, action games Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor, a pre-order of Splot, a fairytale adventure, and Jack Claw, a prototype game featuring a guy with a rather large claw!

Trauma has since been added to the bundle, and can be downloaded by those who had already paid and redeemed their codes simply by visiting the unique link sent via email.  This one sounds like a different sort of game, described on the site as a “photographic experience” in the mind of a traumatized young woman.. I’m half-expecting something on the lines of Korsakovia, but we’ll see! 🙂

Dwarfs!?

Having a Dwarf-obsessed friend means that a game with a title like this one gets instant attention!  That’s not to say it didn’t deserve it though..

Dwarfs!? is an arcade/strategy game which puts you in the role of Overseer of a Dwarf colony, aiming to make as much gold as possible.  To actually get the gold, you have diggers, who head off randomly in search of loot, but rather like lemmings often end up getting themselves killed in water, lava, or being attacked by various enemies!  For defense, you have warriors, which can be trained up at outposts and fired out of a cannon towards bosses!

I downloaded the demo several weeks ago, but then failed to even launch it, with so many other games to play, and an attention span like that of a goldfish.  However, the game appeared on Steam for just £2, so it ended up in the collection anyway 😉

The tutorial is voiced by one of the Yoggscast guys.. I wasn’t too keen on the rather forced “Dwarf” voice he was putting on, though I’m sure his fans love it, and it is good to see a boost for an indie developer too!  The developer is Power of Two.. a two-man team, assistend and published by Tripwire Interactive 🙂

Dealing with water or lava caves requires a sacrifice in the form of one of your diggers blowing himself up to create a hole.  Fortunately, your base produces more diggers as time goes on, so you don’t run out.. and trapping either cave provides you a bonus.

Enemies are fought off by your warriors, with bosses confronted via the awesome Dwarf Cannon, which fires warriors!

Once out of the tutorial, there are a few game modes to try out.. in Arcade, you simply aim to gather as much gold as possible in a set time limit.  The dungeon is randomly generated, so you just have to hope the diggers hit a treasure cave  before a water or lava cave.. and by the end of a 15 minute game there are so many diggers wandering around it’s hard to keep track of them all!

Other game modes include Tower Defense gameplay, Rush Mode, with crazy spawning of diggers, Dark Mode, in which you can only see the tunnels your dwarfs have made.. no guiding them towards loot, then, as well as a series of Challenges.. and Leaderboards to compare with friends.. or if I were a Dwarf, to measure my beard against 😉

HOARD

A friend bought us all HOARD this weekend, as a 4-pack on Steam.  Yay! 🙂

HOARD is a mix of action and strategy, developed by indie team Big Sandwich Games, where each player takes on the role of a dragon in a table-top style medieval kingdom with farms, towns, princesses and knights..

Every dragon needs treasure, and this is obtained through burning down farms or towns, intercepting wagons full of tithes, and capturing and ransoming princesses.

The game has a co-op mode, which allows friends to work together to gather as much treasure as possible in one shared hoard, but you can also play competitively.. this can mean racing them to the treasure, or actively trying to get in their way or kill them!  Killing another dragon forces them to drop their treasure and flee straight back to their hoard, where they are unable to move while they regenerate health.. a great opportunity to steal the dropped treasure 😉

At the beginning of each game, your dragon only has weak abilities, but as you gather more treasure you are able to spend points and upgrade your dragon’s speed, fire-breathing capability, carrying capacity and damage resistance.  I prefer to improve the speed of my dragon, as well as fire-breathing, but I think this could change depending on the map and game mode.

Upgrades cost more at each level, so you need to gather more and more gold to keep upgrading.  The kingdom also improves over time, with towns becoming larger and producing archers, who will fire on you.  If you do enough damage to a town you can scare them enough that they ‘belong’ to you, and send you tithes.. a nice way of gathering money automatically 🙂

During a competitive game, you will need to keep an eye on ‘your’ towns, as other dragons will want to take them over.. either by damaging the town enough to turn its loyalty to them, or by destroying the town centre and resetting the town’s loyalty.  Giants also appear in the kingdom.. they will attack towns they come across unless suitably distracted.. say with some fiery breath.. 😉

There are also small towers around the map, which spawn knights.  The knights will attack you if you pass by, and if you capture a princess, all the knights in the vicinity will come to try and rescue her!  I found the knights were best avoided until you had levelled up a little, as they are rather strong and can kill you easily if you stray too close.  As the kingdom grows, the towers become keeps, with more knights being spawned.. increasing the danger but also the reward, as the ransom value goes up with the level of the keep!

Another danger comes from the mage towers, which fire bolts at nearby dragons: destroying one of these reveals a large gem which is worth a lot of gold, but slows the dragon and makes you vulnerable to attack while carrying it.  I found the upgraded towers harder to destroy, as one mistake in avoiding the bolts means death.. and as the bolts can travel a long way, I sometimes got killed by a bolt set off by another dragon!

On all the maps, there are a variety of power-ups, which appear at regular intervals.  These can give you stronger firebreath, icy breath, or allow you to shoot fireballs.. another increases your speed, while the last is maybe a little evil, allowing a player to steal from another dragon’s hoard.. aside from the obvious exchange of gold, this has the added advantage of resetting the victim’s score multiplier!

As well as the Treasure game modes, there is “Princess Rush”, where you need to capture the most princesses to win, and a survival mode, which I’ve not tried yet.

Terraria Take Two

I decided to restart my single-player game as being too close to the Corruption meant I wasn’t going to get much time actually building, exploring, and making the awesome weapons I’d seen in multiplayer.  With only Slimes and Zombies, and the occasional Demon Eye pestering me, building my first room was rather easy 🙂

This time, my Guide waited patiently on the hill, rather than running off into danger!

As in Minecraft, I soon went underground looking for resources.
I find myself getting mentally stuck on this kind of thing at times, feeling like I need to collect resources before I can get on with the rest of the game.. I think this could get a little obsessive..

I’m finding very few resources so far.. but I have been able to collect enough wood and stone to extend my house, and I’ve finally had a Merchant move in!

Terraria is also turning out to be rather a hit.. showing that indie developers can be very successful with the right idea at the right time.  The game has been out for nine days and has sold 200,000 copies and has been at the top of the Steam sales charts.. a very good place to be! 🙂

The Ball

The Ball is an indie action-adventure puzzle game using the Unreal engine, featuring an archaelogist who gets stuck in a cave and finds a mysterious artifact.. The Ball.  This game started off as a mod for Unreal Tournament.. shows what hard work can do!  Two friends have been playing this game, and both have come back with nothing but praise for it, so I thought I should try it out 🙂

The demo allows the first few puzzles to be played out in campaign mode, as well as trying out Survival mode, where you have to stay alive as long as possible against floods of enemies.

I started with the campaign and very quickly became twitchy, expecting bad things to come shooting out of every corner, or for something to come down from the ceiling and crush me.  I only felt a little better once I found the Ball..

The first few rooms are all about teaching you how to play.. pressure plates for you to stand on, how to use the Hammer, and how to handle the Ball.  There are several jokes in here, but I’m not touching them! 😉

As mentioned, I was rather twitchy while playing this, and the rather ugly monkeys in some of the first few rooms gave me the creeps..
I was being mocked by a friend for this, but I think it’s just as well I was twitchy, because when the first zombies appeared I was quick to fire the Ball at them.

I’d be tempted to get the game, as it’s easy to play, looks fantastic and solving the later puzzles in the demo was very satisfying.. but with all puzzle games, there comes a point where I find myself stuck, leaving it for a while, and then not completing it.. I have enough uncompleted games 😉

Love for the Little Games

The first ‘little’ game of the week was a freebie I spotted on Twitter: Super Crate Box, an indie game from Vlambeer.

This reminded me of the games I used to play on the Spectrum when I was tiny, with simple gameplay, arcade style graphics and music.  I had to kill the music after a little while though, as there was no option to lower the volume and I found it rather headache-inducing..

Dodge enemies, pick up crates, get guns, shoot enemies!

Each crate has a different weapon; dual pistols, shotgun, bazooka, and other weapons which can be unlocked over time like the revolver.. I liked the bazooka best of the weapons I tried, with the explosion able to take out more enemies.

The second game of the week is also a free one; Steel Storm Episode 1 by Kot-in-Action.   Well.. episode 1 is free, and also open-source (woop!) with Episode 2 being available to pre-order.  Not a bad way of doing things!

So.. a top-down shooter with power-ups, loads of enemies, and best of all multiple game modes including co-op!

The game is suprisingly challenging, due to massive waves of enemies, including some which spawn around you as you progress, and bosses which hit quite hard.

There is plenty to blow up.. there are structures you need to destroy to bring down forcefields for progression, but there are also other bits of tubing, crates, etc, which can be blown up.  Some of these reveal repair pick-ups, but there are not enough to go kamikaze.. you really need to make use of cover and avoid getting hit.. but I lack patience!

When you die you lose all the weapons you’ve found up till that point; good for your co-op partner who can grab them, but bad for you when you’re then back to your starting weapon.  We only spent one evening playing this, and I think it deserves more time.. I love it 🙂